Michal Čihař -
Multi language site with PHP and gettext

As announced yesterday, I started to translate my website to Czech. I
take it mostly as experiment how to do such thing easily. I don't want
ot maintain different pages for each language, so the logical step
seemed to use gettext which I know for translating regullar
applications.

Using gettext from PHP is quite easy. You can just follow
documentation and you will get basic idea. Only tricky part was to set
encoding so that messages are displayed correctly.

The whole magic that selects translation based on host name is few lines
of PHP code:

You can see that is't just locales and gettext initialisation and
cutting host name so that rest of code doesn't have to deal both
possibilities.

The hardest work is to make all PHP pages use gettext instead of plain
text constants and translate them. I will probably never convert whole
site, but it is not needed and only parts can be translated using this
approach without any additional effort.